Slow largest contentful paint: what it is and how to fix it
What it is
The main content takes too long to appear.
Why it matters to a client
This measures how long someone stares at a mostly blank screen. Past about two and a half seconds, a noticeable share of phone visitors give up.
How to find it
Check the page in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, or open the Performance tab of the site in AuditOpti — we pull the same Google data for the homepage and the top crawled pages.
How to fix it
Compress the hero image, load it eagerly rather than lazily, and remove render-blocking scripts from the top of the page.
- 1Install an image optimization plugin and convert the library to WebP.
- 2Make sure the hero image is not lazy-loaded — lazy loading the largest visible image makes this metric worse, not better.
- 3Defer or remove render-blocking scripts loaded in the head, especially chat and heatmap widgets.
- 4Re-test in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, not desktop.
How AuditOpti prioritizes it
AuditOpti scores this as high severity by default, then multiplies it by how many pages are affected — one page is not the same problem as a hundred. After that, the AI re-ranks it against everything else on the site by likely business impact, so a high-severity problem on a service page can outrank a critical one on a page nobody visits.
Check a site for this
Run a free audit and we'll tell you whether this issue is present — along with everything else worth fixing.